NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is confident Sweden will join the military alliance by July at the latest, he told German news agency DPA this week. 

The next NATO summit will be held in Washington from July 9-11 and the Nordic country will be a fully-fledged member by then, he said. 

Sweden and Finland abandoned decades of neutrality and both applied to become NATO allies in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Helsinki's bid was swiftly approved, Stockholm's is being held up by both Turkey and Hungary.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants the Swedish government to act against Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) members on its soil and is leveraging his veto power to get F-16 fighter jets from the U.S. 

Although Vladimir Putin’s Russia will stand or fall in Siberia’s oil and gas fields, it is first necessary to mention some of the other contingencies the Russian authorities must factor into their ongoing analyses.

Former US President Donald Trump has begun a court fight to get himself back on this year’s election ballot in Maine, arguing in a legal filing that a state official had no authority to disqualify him from the race.

Trump’s lawyers filed the appeal on Tuesday in Maine Superior Court, challenging last week’s decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows to bar the ex-president from the ballot because of his alleged role in the January 2021 US Capitol riot. The case is likely to ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court – along with Trump’s disqualification from the ballot in Colorado – but he was required in Maine to begin his challenge in the state court system.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted that 2024 will be “even more crazy” than the preceding four years. Musk was responding to a follower wishing for “a normal year.”

“Can we just have a normal year in 2024?” an anonymous pundit known as ‘Wall Street Silver’ tweeted on New Year’s Eve. “Don’t we deserve that after four years of crazy?”

“2024 is gonna be even more crazy is my prediction,” Musk responded on Monday.

Musk did not predict any “crazy”events that may happen, but in a series of follow-up tweets, the billionaire drew attention to the pace of AI development, rising mortality among young people after mass vaccination against Covid-19, record-breaking illegal immigration to the US, and anti-white rhetoric from South African presidential hopeful Julius Malema.

Lithuania may have been too optimistic about Ukraine’s chances in the conflict with Russia, Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte told the state broadcaster LRT in an interview published on Tuesday.

Speaking with LRT for the year-end special, recorded on Friday, Simonyte touched on Lithuania’s security situation and how it has been impacted by the Ukraine conflict. 

“It will probably not be too farfetched to say that we expected a very different result from the war this year than what we have today,” she told the broadcaster. “Unfortunately, that means that we have to start counting on the fact that the scenario will not be what we wanted at the beginning of [2023], before the Ukrainian offensive began.”

ONE NEEDS TO REREAD “IL PRINCIPE” DAILY… OKAY, WEEKLY… SURE, MONTHLY… DO IT ONCE A YEAR IF YOU ARE LAZY… AT LEAST ONCE IN A LIFETIME.....

... non lo potrà mai fare se non trae di quella equalità molti d'animo ambizioso e inquieto, e quelli fa gentiluomini in fatti, e non in nome, donando loro castella e possessioni e donando loro favore di sustanze e di uomini, acciocché, posto in mezzo di loro mediante quegli mantenga la sua potenza ed essi mediante quello la loro ambizione, e gli altri siano constretti a sopportare quel giogo che la forza, e non altro mai, può fare sopportare loro.

WE KOWN FROM RECENT EVENTS IN CANADA THAT THE UKRAINIAN NAZIS FOUND SOLACE IN CANADA... THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE FROM "THE CANADA FILES" EXPLAINS: 

New Year’s Day always brings a degree of optimism.  It’s a fresh start. And the New Year can’t be as bad as the one just concluded, can it? 

2023 saw the war in Ukraine drag on even though it became clear after its expected failed offensive that Kiev cannot win the war, and after the Ukrainian side admitted it had a deal with Russia just after the war started that would have saved hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives. Ukraine would have lost less territory too had the U.S. not scotched the deal.  

And 2023 saw the start of a genocidal war by Israel against Gaza in a renewed push to complete Israel’s 1947 dream to control all of historic Palestine by driving even more Palestinians off their land.   

Labor will have – already has – squandered its time and its opportunities. It needs leadership of guts and vision, not timidity, caution and mortal terror of offending anyone.

The holiday season, about midterm in the life of the Albanese government is a good time for academics and journalists to begin making notes, commencing diaries and preparing pitches to publishers about the fate of the government.

Ukraine is a mere tool in the hands of the collective West which is using it to fight Russia, President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. He was speaking at a military hospital in Moscow where he met servicemen wounded during the ongoing conflict.

Asked about the enduring Western support for Kiev, the president said the elites of the collective West were actually the true enemy of Russia, rather than Ukraine itself. 

“The point is not that they are helping our enemy, but that they are our enemy. They are solving their own problems with [Ukraine’s] hands, that’s what it’s all about,” Putin stated.

The Israeli military has said it expects the conflict in Gaza to continue throughout 2024. 

In a new year's message, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman said troop deployments were being adjusted to prepare for "prolonged fighting". 

James Stavridis, the retired Navy Admiral and NATO’s former supreme allied commander for Europe, has made another prediction.

At the beginning of 2023, Stavridis predicted that Russia would “be burned through and exhausted, losing so many men, so much equipment.” His prediction for Russian President Vladimir Putin? Putin will meet the same fate as Nicholas II.

BY Bradley Devlin

Despite this outlandish prediction, Stavridis had a rather sensible prescription: “Let’s all push for a negotiation sometime mid-2023.”

The presumption of innocence the French leader invoked in discussing the sexual assault allegations against the actor is a principle worth defending. But to proclaim pride in a man who regularly displays his contempt for France and his admiration for Vladimir Putin is ludicrous.

Le Monde editorial

Since 2017 and the revelations about predatory film producer Harvey Weinstein, the wave that has liberated the expression of women victims of sexist and sexual violence has also shaken up the way societies, in France as elsewhere, view these acts and their perpetrators, whether anonymous or famous. Because their lives are scrutinized by public opinion as a whole and because their behavior is considered emblematic, artists have fueled debate, often scandal and sometimes progress.

One of two Diggers to die during the Iraq conflict, Jake Kovco, was shot by his own gun, and John Howard made a great show of attending the corporal’s funeral in his small Victorian High Country hometown to calm fears and criticism about the war. But Australians remain none the wiser about what prompted the prime minister to go to war nearly 21 years ago. And they may stay in the dark for a little while longer.

The National Archives of Australia on Monday released the cabinet papers of Howard’s government, but the submissions relied upon by the nation’s spy agencies to justify the decision to join the “coalition of the willing” were missing in action.

China looms large in the Australian psyche. On a practical level, what happens in China largely determines the success of global action to deal with climate change, the profitability of our rural economy and the financing of our universities. Our national leaders are concerned about rising tensions in our region and the interplay of US-China relations. How are we to find our way through media doom and gloom and come to grips with the reality of China?